Wayne O'Leary

Democratic Denouement

In late April, PBS commentator, Washington Post editorialist and MSNBC host Jonathan Capehart, pontificating on the future of American politics, announced that Blacks were the indisputable base of the Democratic Party. Inadvertently, he thereby laid bare a problem that has been bedeviling the Democrats for much of the recent past — the doubled-edged sword of identity politics.

Starting in the Carter years, Democrats began drifting away from their economic-populist roots, a process that accelerated when the Clintons, Bill and Hillary, took the party over in the 1990s as a solely owned subsidiary; it continued unabated through the Obama era. The strategic objective became one of turning an erstwhile left-leaning political institution into a centrist party that would split the difference between old-left Rooseveltian liberalism and new-right Reaganite conservatism, forming a winning nonideological consensus.

Integral to building a new big-tent party was the need to make peace with the business establishment and jettison the remnants of labor militancy and class-conscious worker solidarity standing in the way. Tactically, this entailed finding a replacement cohort for the [mostly white] working class, the foot soldiers of the Democratic Party since the New Deal. Enter the proponents of identity politics. The lunch-pail concerns of unionized blue-collar workers would gradually be displaced by the social concerns of minority “people of color” — civil and voting rights, immigration, and the like.

It didn’t hurt that two Democratic presidents (Carter and Clinton) were Southerners attuned to regional Black culture, or that one (Obama) was himself racially mixed. Also critical was the fact that the leadership of the post-New Deal Democratic Party came out of the 1960s, a time when economic policy and class concerns were secondary to noneconomic issues, such as racial justice, cultural change and the war in Southeast Asia.

The understanding of the current Democratic leaders (the Pelosis, Schumers and Bidens) about what constitutes liberalism or progressivism was therefore not primarily shaped by questions of corporate policy, workers’ rights, or everyday paycheck-to-paycheck existence; their political horizon was instead defined by moderate civic reformism. In particular, the Democratic political establishment of today has no problem with the nation’s economic establishment of Wall Street, Silicon Valley and the Fortune 500.

Profit is not a bad word to the party’s reigning centrists and hasn’t been since the halcyon fundraising days of Tony Coelho, Clinton loyalist and chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) in the 1980s, who introduced them to the corrosive joys of corporate campaign money, Republican-style. The chief shortcoming of the corporate establishment, as they see it, is not that it’s corrupt at its core, but simply that it lacks racial and gender balance; they believe in “the market.”

The dominant policy initiatives of this generation of Democratic moderates have been threefold: (1) the push for corporate-led economic globalization, which under Clinton meant advancing the ideal of free trade regardless of the impact at home; (2) the rejection of a universal single-payer healthcare system in favor of the Obama administration’s incrementalist, market-based reform, the business-friendly ACA; and (3) the continuing commitment to largely unchecked immigration produced by massive population flows originating in the Third World, a 50-year-old bipartisan project backed by US business interests and still endorsed by the Biden administration (on social humanitarian grounds, though its cause is mostly economic).

The foregoing Democratic positions define the party in policy terms; they share one thing in common: a reluctance to confront corporate interests and deny corporate priorities. In this respect, the Democrats have become as much a pro-business entity as the Republicans, a stance that runs counter to the Rooseveltian tradition dominating the party from roughly the 1930s through the 1970s. During that period, Democrats were a liberal-labor coalition that critiqued laissez-faire capitalism and sought to control its excesses. No longer, except in isolated instances.

More recently, the most progressive elements in the party attempted to drag Democrats back to their roots by joining the economics-based Sanders crusades of 2016 and 2020. But today’s Democratic progressive movement has itself evolved and changed, losing sight of its original purpose; it’s now less about economic populism and more about racial- and gender-based identity politics, ironically mirroring the party establishment. Black Lives Matter and MeToo have altered Democratic politics by focusing attention on emotional causes that don’t require challenging the corporate establishment; progressivism has been redefined in the process.

This brings us back around to the Jonathan Capehart assertion that Blacks (not, say, workers) are the base of the Democratic Party. For Capehart, who is Black himself, this seems an attempt at a self-fulfilling prophecy. If so, it may be succeeding, judging by the Biden administration’s unbalanced appointments policy, which unduly rewards one numerically small party cohort.

Hand in hand with this expression of interest-group activism is the casual, cavalier dismissal of pocketbook concerns by an establishmentarian Democratic leadership primarily oriented toward addressing social issues, racial equity foremost among them. Not coincidentally, perhaps, the recent Supreme Court abortion ban has been lately reframed as a racist decision aimed specifically at minority women. Even immigration is portrayed by many pro-immigration open-borders Democrats as a racial-justice issue because the bulk of the incoming undocumented are nonwhite.

As we enter the 2022 campaign, identity politics, once a fringe preoccupation limited to what Stanford political scientist Francis Fukuyama calls the “identitarian left” (to contrast it with the equally extreme “populist nationalist right”) has become the be-all and end-all for the Democratic Party. Where the remnants of Sanders-style economic populism continue to find expression — for example, in this year’s attempts to primary and unseat corporate Democrats like Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) — the party establishment, through the DCCC, is actively working to quash them.

But there’s some good news for Democrats despairing of their party’s currently narrow, counterproductive political course. A report issued in early June by the nonprofit group American Family Voices and written by Democratic strategist and former labor organizer Mike Lux, analyzes the reasons for the party’s startling loss of 2.6 million voters since 2012 in the Midwest industrial heartland. Based on interviews, focus groups, and polling by Democratic-connected Lake Research Partners, it offers as its key recommendation a return to “progressive populism” to reverse the economic frustration and dislocation that’s alienated its traditional working-class constituency.

Even donkeys can relearn old tricks.

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.

From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2022

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